I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication systems, and more specifically to frequency spectrum allocation.
II. Background
Wireless communication networks are widely deployed to provide various communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, etc. These wireless networks may be multiple-access networks capable of supporting multiple users by sharing the available network resources. Examples of such multiple-access networks include Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) networks, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) networks, Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) networks, Orthogonal FDMA (OFDMA) networks, and Single-Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) networks.
A wireless communication network may include a number of base stations that can support communication for a number of mobile entities, such as, for example, user equipments (UEs). A UE may communicate with a base station via the downlink and uplink. The downlink (or forward link) refers to the communication link from the base station to the UE, and the uplink (or reverse link) refers to the communication link from the UE to the base station.
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) represents a major advance in cellular technology as an evolution of Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS). The LTE physical layer (PHY) provides a highly efficient way to convey both data and control information between base stations, such as an evolved Node Bs (eNBs), and mobile entities, such as UEs.
With the continued advance and adoption of wireless communication technologies, including but not limited to newer releases of UMTS (e.g., LTE and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A)), there may be a diversity of radio access technologies (RATs) implanted in any given wireless communication environment. At the same time, certain legacy or existing RATs will gradually be phased out over time, and certain new RATs will be phased in. In this context, there is a need for enabling network entities to efficiently reallocate frequency spectrum blocks allocated for an existing RAT to a new RAT, and thereby achieve soft migration from the existing RAT to the new RAT such that an increasing amount of the frequency spectrum can be re-used by the new RAT over time.